Monterey County, state growers unlikely to be impacted by proposed food safety rules

New food safety rules proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday will have little impact on California, experts say.

California has some of the most stringent food safety rules in the country, particularly after the 2006 E. coli spinach crisis.

"We really have all the bases covered in California," said Bob Roach, the county's assistant agricultural commissioner.

The law is one of the biggest changes in policy for the FDA in decades and is aimed at stopping outbreaks which kill an estimated 3,000 people a year from foodborne illness.

The lengthy proposal calls for manufacturers to create food safety plans and growers to implement new standards for water, health and hygiene, soil, farm equipment sanitation, and distance between animals and produce.

Roach said he did not think anything in the new rules were different from what California growers were already doing.

In particular, a FDA provision which suggests farmworkers use portable toilets is not only followed by county growers, but they are are required to pay a fee to register the toilets and are regularly checked by the county health department.

Scott Horsfall, CEO of the California Leafy Green Products marketing agreement, said he believed its program met or exceeded the FDA's proposed new rules.

He said Friday afternoon he had read about 100 pages of the 600-plus page report, so he could not definitively say if there was anything in it that California growers weren't doing.

"We do feel like, as an industry, we're very well positioned to work with the FDA on the implementation of these rules," he said, "because we are all doing so much of it."

The leafy greens organization, formed in the wake of the spinach crisis, is a voluntary group made up of about 99 percent of California salad producers.

The new rules are not set in stone. There is still a 120-day comment period and it will take 60 days for the law to go into effect after that.

The law was first passed by Congress in 2011, but the Obama administration did not push it through the FDA until recently.